Best of Luck for your further studies .
You need to be good when it comes to system administration side in order to get your hands dirty in penetration testing . Study the working of DNS , DHCP and other things etc.

Best of Luck again

Your IT experience ?
Secondly check your local market . I have seen Ethical Hacker / Penetration tester in USA having a lot of experience . even 15Years+ or more IT experience . So if you are new in IT field I wont recommend you to go for it because people in the market with same job will be having a lot of experience as compared to yours.

BackTrack is based on slackware linux . My friend just passed RHCE and I will learn some of basic things of linux from him . Waiting for other people comments on this topic .

OWSP along with CWNA and CWSP with make a good combination.

Damn Vulnerable Linux is also offering certifications
hxxp://www.damnvulnerablelinux.org/index.php/eng/Certification

One more has been added to BackTrack competitors list .

slimjim100,
are you talking about SPAN ? The "Cisco Catalyst Switched Port Analyzer" in which we can configure a port or several ports to send a copy of that data to specific port and that can be monitored using softwares like Wireshark or other network monitoring software ?

Correct me if I am getting it wrong .

A friend of mine got a question form a CISSP that :
A person enters an organization pretending to be an electrician and gets access to the Data Center and completes his work . In the whole procedure he does not talk to a single person .

What kind of Flaws are there in this case . He meant that is there Physical Security involved or not and is there Social Engg. involved or not .

My answer to the question was that only Physical Security is the problem , the person was not involved in Social Engg. because Social Engg. means that you interact with a human being , and in the case that person went straight to the data center , but my friend was saying that there is social engg. involved since he disguised himself . 


What you guys say ?

Hello everyone,
                     I am new over here and I want to discuss something about my career here with you guys . I did my Diploma in Networks in 2006 and then started searching for the job but never got any so I decided to resume my academic qualifications until I get some job because I was too young for it . I gave 3 papers of MCSE at that time . I was always curious of working on cisco products because in our area people having experience on cisco devices were respected much and payed more as compared to the microsoft guys. Also when it came to cisco we usually talked about huge networks and Microsoft was always for smaller networks whenever it comes to Routing and Switching and other stuff ( regardless of the mailing services ) . I always dreamed about getting into the "IT Security" field and so I am right now . In 2008 I got an opportunity to get an internship into a bank and then after the internship I entered a Cisco's Partner company as a Network Engineer providing high end solution country wide . I now am working towards my CCSP and there are only 2 papers left for me to get my CCSP credentials . I now have forgot most of the stuff of Microsoft, still I have got good hands on troubleshooting smaller things because I got 9 years of experience with this thing called a Personal Computer and Windows .  I dont have much experience on Linux operating systems , just Installed Kubuntu on my personal Laptop . I want to ask you guys that If i enroll in the OSCP course , will I be able to get through it ? I have seen its course outline and it seems similar to the CEH course outline but it has got the challenge exam . I now don't have much skills on System Administration side , I am more leaned towards networks now, should I think of getting my hands dirty in this Penetration Testing field or should I continue my Network Administration field and go for CCIE-Security . One more thing is that in our area there is a short of penetration testers people hardly know about methodology like OSSTMM etc. In simple words there is a shortage of people working in specialized areas.

Thanks.....
I am downloading this movie... on my 128K Shared connection... so will take quite a time..

Thanks again.